Piastri’s 1.91s pit stop was lightning. McLaren’s Sunday was anything but.
Oscar Piastri left Monza with the fastest pit stop of the 2025 season to date — a razor-sharp 1.91 seconds that would’ve looked routine if the rest of McLaren’s late-race choreography hadn’t unravelled. Within a lap, the other MCL38 was tripped up by a 5.87s service for Lando Norris, triggering a tense team-orders shuffle and a lot of soul-searching on the pit wall.
Max Verstappen won it for Red Bull — his third of the year — while McLaren, who’d been on a roll since Canada, were forced to settle for P2 and P3 after a strategy gamble that relied on late drama never quite paid off. The headline for the title fight: Piastri’s lead shrinks to 31 points over Norris with eight rounds to go, but the Australian still holds the upper hand.
The flashpoint came with 15 laps left. McLaren had kept both drivers out deep into the final stint, waiting for a Safety Car or red flag to spring an ambush. There was logic: stop late enough for softs and, if something neutralised the race, have two orange cars in Verstappen’s mirrors on warmer rubber. When it didn’t materialise, Andrea Stella’s team switched to containment mode.
Here’s where they bent their usual code. Piastri, running behind Norris on track, got the call first on Lap 45 to shield against Charles Leclerc’s undercut. It was ruthlessly efficient: 1.91s and clean air secured. Norris followed a lap later but sat too long on the jacks, tumbling behind his teammate when he rejoined.
McLaren’s radio order was immediate and clinical. Piastri was told to hand the place back, the pair swapping on the main straight to restore Norris to second. It defused a potential intra-team flare-up but not the questions about how they got there.
Stella, speaking afterwards, defended the decision-making. He argued the late-stop approach was aimed at a bigger prize and that, even with the delay, the undercut on fresh softs should’ve been powerful enough for Norris to recover most of the lost time anyway. “We’ll review all the data,” he said, acknowledging the slow stop “compounded” the situation but insisting the intention wasn’t to flip the order through pit timing. In other words: the strategy wasn’t designed to undercut Norris; the pit stop miscue only made the optics worse.
Piastri’s pit crew, meanwhile, delivered the sort of stop that wins awards and — in tighter races — wins championships. The 1.91s service undercuts the previous 2025 benchmark, a 1.94s McLaren pit for Norris in Hungary. And, for the trivia lovers, Woking still owns the all-time record: 1.80 seconds at the 2023 Qatar Grand Prix. When they’re on, they’re untouchable over the lines.
The trouble is you don’t win titles with one immaculate service and one sticky one on adjacent laps. And at Monza, the slow stop didn’t just re-order the McLarens; it gave Verstappen breathing room he didn’t need. For a team that’s been almost perfect since Montreal, it was all a bit scruffy at the worst possible time.
The points picture remains fascinating. McLaren leave with a strong haul and, crucially, no obvious bruises between their drivers beyond a few tense minutes on the radio. Piastri still leads, Norris still has the momentum, and Verstappen is lurking — opportunistic as ever — to punish any orange missteps.
There’s also a bigger-picture note worth chewing on. McLaren were bold in staying out, and bold often wins you titles. But bold has consequences when it strips away control. The Leclerc threat forced their hand, they sequenced stops out of order, and in doing so they invited the very team-orders conversation they’ve tried to avoid all year. If you’re looking for fine margins, that’s where they live.
Eight to go. Margins measured in tenths, maybe hundredths. Pit lanes, not press releases, will decide this fight.
Quietly, you suspect McLaren know it. The data review Stella promised will be forensic. The next time they go late and roll the dice, they’ll want the pit crew’s 1.9-second muscle without the 5.8-second bruise.
For the rest of us, that’s the good stuff. Two young drivers with a title to settle, a team walking the tightrope, and a Red Bull that refuses to check out of this story. Monza didn’t decide the championship. It did, however, remind everyone where it will be won: at the margins, under pressure, with the clock ticking and the wheels still turning.
